Assassin’s Creed

This work came about as a test to working with video in Logic Pro, which I had only previously done in ProTools and Adobe Premiere.

Also, I wanted to create a finished work in which I used traditional tonal systems and rhythms, as a counter to my early academic work which is mostly electroacoustic in nature, and where the tonality, if any, is more dissonant. I want to move back to more traditional tonal and harmonic systems of music in my composition, as I feel I explored the atonal and dissonant in my early academic explorations.

I wanted a theme to represent the main character of the game, and then used this to create the main orchestration behind it. I ascertained that there needed to be a “driving” rhythm, to capture the excitement of the chase. The toll of the bell is obviously fundamental to the animation, so I made sure make it prominent in the audio. At the end of the clip, the main character “blends” into a crowd, (a feature of the game used to avoid detection by enemies) which I wanted to represent musically, whereby the character’s motif disappears into the monks’, using a culturally recognizable sound to represent the monks (organum-style parallel fifths).

With all these constraints, putting the work together was simple, and completed within a couple of days. I think the work is a little too “busy” which is due to trying to convey a lot of information in a very short space of time, and I would probably create a sparser texture if the piece was longer.